Tuesday, June 21, 2005

Reading :: Dialogues

This book belongs to a series of conventional interviews with philosophers, but since Deleuze refused to perform a traditional interview, it turned into a coauthored book between Deleuze and his interviewer, Claire Parnet. This move keeps Deleuze from being interrogated, something he and Parnet both agree is not desirable. But it also means that Deleuze is not asked to communicate in a different mode; we don't get the different perspective that we typically get in interviews (which is why we read them in the first place). Instead, Parnet starts to write like Deleuze, so much so that I had a hard time figuring out who was who. This was a stated goal, presented as a struggle against the interview genre, but it seemed like flat-out colonization to me. And as a result, I saw nothing here that was not covered in greater length in A Thousand Plateaus. Go read that book instead -- or better yet, Gregory Bateson's Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity.